Diseases are the major constraints in aquaculture, and biosecurity is critical for sustainable development of aquaculture. This work emphasizes how biosecurity measures and their relative importance can be quantified and documented in an objective way . The system approaches internal and external biosecurity in a general manner, focusing on transmission routes shared by numerous different types of infectious agents. Norwegian veterinary institute worked with research institutes and farmers from Croatia, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey to estimate biosecurity risk associated with disease introduction and spread i nto seabass and seabream farms in 8 different countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin (Tavornpanich, S. et al. 2020) . The same approach has been tested for Atlantic salmon farms in Norway. This quantitative system helps to identify gaps and weaknesses in the biosecurity plan, assists farmers to allocate resources and tailor the biosecurity programme to fit the risk profile of their farms. If the system is applied in region it also helps to compare a specific farm with an average of the biosecurity scores obtained by neighbouring farms, so that the owners can benchmark their biosecurity and evaluate the risk profile of the region. This benchmarking may give owners impelling reason to improve their farm biosecurity. The system can be modified to fit various farm production characteristics (e.g. RAS), different exposures (e.g. antibiotics), and for different disease agents. This system is developed to be a farmer self-assessment tool with a user friendly automate dashboard containing the functionalities so that the farmers interested in an objective evaluation of farm or regional biosecurity can have a secure access of their own information.
Tavornpanich, S., Leandro, M., Le Breton, A., Chérif, N., Basurco, B., Furones , D., Muniesa, A., Toffan, A., Dalla Pozza, M., Franzago, E., Zrncic, S., Varvarigos , P., Saleh, H., Cagirgan , H., Dverdal Jansen, M., and Brun, E. (2020). Biosecurity and risk of disease introduction and spread in Mediterranean seabass and seabream farms. Deliverable 4.1 of the Horizon 2020 project MedAID (http://www.medaid-h2020.eu/index.php/deliverables/)